Mystery bright spots could be first glimpse of another universe | New Scientist
THE curtain at the edge of the universe may be rippling, hinting that there’s more backstage. Data from the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope could be giving us our first glimpse of another universe, with different physics, bumping up against our own. That’s the tentative conclusion of an analysis by Ranga-Ram Chary, a researcher at Planck’s US data centre in California. Armed with Planck’s painstaking map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – light lingering from the hot, soupy state of the early universe – Chary revealed an eerie glow that could be due to matter from a neighbouring universe leaking into ours.
What's Behind Murray Vs. Trump?
A lot of Trump’s presentation and appeal is that he is in essence just a guy from Queens who made good for himself, and who may still have a bit of a chip on his shoulder. Trump’s Flyover Country supporters see a kindred spirit who happens to be a billionaire, but for those significantly concerned with propriety, they see an intolerably boorish lout.
A New Way of Thinking About Spacetime That Turns Everything Inside Out
“There’s a single bead of glass that’s being redundantly represented in different parts of the space,” Ismael says. “If you focus in on the larger embedding space, the physical description of the three-dimensional kaleidoscope, you’ve got a straightforward causal story. There’s a piece of glass, the piece of glass is being reflected along the mirrors, and so on.” Seen for what it really is, the kaleidoscope is no longer mysterious, though still pretty awesome.
How Political Correctness Failed Liberalism — Bad Words — Medium
While the planet is melting down, democracy’s broken, the economy’s cratered, the young won’t enjoy careers, retirements, savings, homes, societies are anxious, fractured, angry, the left is furiously obsessed with, willing to battle endlessly over, consumed passionately not with any or all of the above, but by…what to call their love lives. Do you use the right gender pronouns? Are you on board with the latest approved-by-committee terminology? Did you know that according to the internet “romantic” and “sexual” attraction aren’t the same thing? Don’t you know that men can have periods? Hey, is this a safe space?
Why Political Correctness is Failing the World — Bad Words — Medium Political Correctness isn’t moral or political philosophy. It’s evangelical marketing, and that is why it is becoming an absolutist ideological crusade. The average New Leftist will tell you that they vehemently object to the globally oppressive capitalist hegemony. And while they might, they’re also its hapless pawns-slash-delivery-drones: people so wrapped up in painstakingly branding themselves to advertise whom they want and how, they appear to have totally brainwashed one another into forgetting about what truly matters.
Islam, Jihad, and our Ignorance | Politically Short
Through this concept of Islamic warfare, a substantial effort is placed on the “preparation stage”, the object of which is to induce a collapse of faith in the cultural, political, and religious institutions underpinning the target. A very clear example of this doctrine is Pakistani Brigadier General S.K. Malik’s The Quranic Concept of War. As Coughlin explains, “In the Quranic Concept of War, Malik emphasized the importance of laying the groundwork for successful military operations. He explained this preparatory stage as a ‘dislocation of faith’ in the target nation’s sense of security and in the capability of its leaders to defend its territory. The inability of the target population’s leadership to protect its citizens in the face of a terror campaign signals the beginning of kinetic operations in earnest. At some point, dawah (issuing of summons) transitions to jihad.” Elaborating on the concept of dawah, Coughlin highlights that it is “often defined as the ‘invitation’ or ‘call to Islam,” the meaning and purpose of which is more extensive and closely associated with jihad. In fact, much of what is popularly called “stealth jihad” are actions taken in preparation for jihad in the dawah phase of operations.
For as long as I have been alive, the official religion has claimed education results in fewer children. Specifically, educated women have fewer children. Even more specifically, stupid uneducated women have litters of rugrats because they are too dumb to work a rubber. This is the automatic response from Progressives anytime the topic of fertility comes up. I have heard it since forever. That’s always struck me as ridiculous. Stupid teenage girls know where babies come from and how they are made. Humans have understood the mechanics of baby making since the dawn of time. The ancients knew about the use of Silphium as a contraceptive and abortifacient. The women of Rome were not heading off to the university to study folklore, yet they seem to have known where babies came from and how to prevent pregnancy.
I was a black Conservative, and I voted Republican. That can never be forgiven or forgotten. So I guess the better question is why do Liberals hate black Conservatives. Even though I'm not a 'black Conservative', I have been one and I know how they operate. So I'll just pretend that I am one and answer that question in the present tense. Why? Because we're assholes who know more about black people than they do and we dispute the veracity their worldview. Our persistent existence shortcuts the advantage they have in moral persuasion. Due to a typical lack of imagination, they must exemplify 'minorities' as victims of the system whose powers they seek to control.
China Sea Blues: A Thing Not to Do
What would happen if in a shooting war the Chinese crippled the American fleet? Washington is rampant with large egos, especially that of John McCain, the senator from PTSD. If it were discovered that China could disable the Navy, many other countries might conclude that they could do it too. They most certainly would think of this. Washington could not accept the discovery: Fear of the carriers is a large element in Washington’s intimidation of the world. To save face, the US would be tempted to go nuclear, or seriously bomb China proper, with unforeseeable results.
Life After ISIS - Roads & Kingdoms
Back in the SUV, we speed up on the snakelike road onto Sinjar Mountain. This is the route that those who fled ISIS’s advances took in August 2014. The asphalt makes long sweeps and switchbacks up the steep terrain. At many points along the road are scattered messes of clothing, as if someone had opened a suitcase and flipped it over. A red jumper fitted for an infant catches my eye as we pass, then a small pair of shoes, then a suit matted near a flower-patterned dress. Their colors are faded from the year baking in the sun, vivid decaying reminders of terror, of running, of war blanketing the mountain.
Trump Trouble Report | Scott Adams Blog
On Trump’s mocking of the reporter with a disability, that probably crossed the line of appropriate presidential behavior according to nearly every observer. But in one week you’ll remember that Trump is similarly unkind about the physicality of all the other candidates as well. He called Rubio sweaty, Rand Paul unattractive, and Fiorina stern-faced. And you will also remember that Trump is the recipient of more physical insults than any human in the history of the universe.
The Norwegian Secret To Enjoying A Long Winter
This is easy enough to change; simply refuse to participate in the Misery Olympics. Talk about how the cold gives you a chance to drink tea or hot chocolate all day. Talk about ice skating, or building snowmen. Bundle up and go for a walk outside, knowing that you’ll likely feel warmer and happier after a few minutes. Better yet, go with a friend. Social plans are a great reason to haul yourself out from under the covers.
The day I became a millionaire — Medium
Then in 2006, it suddenly happened from one day to the next. Jeff Bezos had taken an interest in Basecamp, and Jason and I each sold him a minority, no-control stake of our share of the company for a few million dollars each (Basecamp had been self-funded and profitable from the start, so didn’t need any capital for the venture). I was a millionaire!
Inside Mark Zuckerberg's Bold Plan For The Future Of Facebook
"If we’re trying to build a world-class News Feed, and a world-class messaging product, and a world-class search product, and a world-class ad system, and invent virtual reality, and build drones, I can’t write every line of code," he tells me. "I can’t write any lines of code."
San Francisco Values
For a decade or two now, the rich haven’t needed to make much of an effort because they’ve managed to beguile liberals in much the same way that Tom Sawyer tricked his friends into whitewashing the fence. Rather than clamoring to redistribute wealth, liberalism now gratefully accepts whatever crumbs wealth deigns to bestow—and in return treats wealth with the obsequious deference of a court eunuch.How this happened—and especially its San Francisco pedigree—I hope to explain. It’s long been a truism that California is the political and cultural bellwether for the nation. But this particular export remains underappreciated.
For the moment, though, it’s enough to recognize that both the rich and the Left—and above all the rich Left—have a clear interest in obscuring and even denying their arrangement: the Left because they need the culture’s rhetorical guns trained rightward in order to maintain their grip on power; the rich to deflect scrutiny and envy from themselves.
You are the Someone |
The West is filled with millions of people like Alex, all of them waiting for Someone. They are the product of a multi-decade campaign to deliberately empty people of their culture; to actually make them ashamed of it. They were purposely drained of God, country, family like chickens so they could be stuffed with the latest narrative of the progressive meme machine. The Gramscian idea was to produce a blank slate upon which the Marxist narrative could be written.
Reading the Electoral Tea Leaves: We Win, They Lose
Since the 2010 midterms, the Democrat party has lost over 1,200 seats in government according to Real Clear Politics. That’s governorships, state senate, state house, town councils, county leadership, city councils, and mayors. Not only are they losing on economic issues, but they’re losing on the social issues. And it’s no surprise, for even though the left has been winning on so many fronts, the broader populace is not pleased. According to a Washington Post, ABC News poll in July, fully 63% of adult Americans are either strongly or somewhat uncomfortable with the direction of the country on social issues. We mustn’t forget who is driving that “uncomfortable” agenda.
Winter storm on Highway 80 near Baxter, California
The Death of Political Correctness | Bill Whittle and Stefan Molyneux
Pass it on.
…here’s what you may have missed:
- miscegenation is rampant. mostly one kind: white women with black men. also, the boob tube landscape is filling with mystery meat kids.
- grrlpower is on steroids. women run corporations, the military, and the united federation of planets. in fights, they routinely kick the asses of men twice their size.
- the bad guys are still nordic-looking white men. (with a few notable exceptions)
- insipid feminist boilerplate is not just implied, it is blatantly preached. the effect is jarring to anyone with half a brain cell.
- fags are everywhere, and all of them are well-adjusted middle class normals, brandishing the aforementioned mystery meat adopted children.
- did i mention the mudsharking? jeezus.
- black characters are still numinous, still wise, still doctors, lawyers, judges, and (most laughably) deep state operatives.
- trannies are beginning to make appearances. (glowing, of course)
"I think #BlackLivesMatter and Al Sharpton is going to have to go to these neighborhoods and just take their kids away until we get our freedom."
"The year 2014 turned out to be the deadliest on record since the US government began collecting this type of data. The trend lines are sobering and don’t require sophisticated analysis:
"It becomes even more difficult to avert our eyes from the emerging human disaster when terror attacks with at least 100 fatalities are charted....
"Someone in the audience (I will let you, good reader, guess who) finally asked the obvious question: “We have reams of data, yet all the charts show a huge spike in terror fatalities. Can you name an instance, supported by good evidence, of better data making for better counterterrorism policy?”
"I heard the audience gasp, and a flicker of consternation crossed the pale faces of the presenters. They recovered quickly, however.
"The data, said one of them brightly, shows that whatever we are doing isn’t working very well....
"....The young men and women who massacred 130 innocents in the theaters and restaurants of Paris were carriers of a deadly but preventable virus. Terror researchers stood in the same relation to that horror as pathologists in the Center for Disease Control would to a severe outbreak of avian flu. They werenât interested in spectacular events: their job was to protect and immunize the population.
"A cure was possible, at least in principle. All we need is rigor and research. Whatever we have done since 9/11 hasnât worked very well, but that just means we should try harder. We should gather more data, make more correlations, test more hypotheses, until the inevitable scientific breakthrough arrives. (By then, inshallah, all the people in the room will have retired.) Persistence, of the well-funded kind, is the key.
"This, let me suggest, is the opposite of cynicism. The sophisticated minders of terror data, like the most naïve Americans, looked on the placid surface of their social relations, and discovered universal forms. Read the rest @ the fifth wave
Morgan at the House of Eratosthenes writes
Ever notice?
Things to do if you buy the conservative narrative:
1. Work hard 2. Find ways to enhance your skill set, so you can make more money 3. Spend time with your family, let your kids see what responsible adults do 4. DON’T turn in your weapons 5. Pay your taxes, but get angry when they’re wasted 6. Hold politicians accountable for wasting money on useless social programs 7. Invest 8. Give to charity 9. CHOOSE your own charities! 10. Start a business, if you’re really sure the time is right
Things to do if you buy the liberal narrative:
1. Support Obama’s latest plan to do X 2. Don’t resist 3. Go on Facebook and help us argue with people 4. Sign Joe Biden’s birthday card!! 5. Did we mention, don’t resist? 6. Do less something, do more nothing, emit less carbon 7. Get angry at businesses for…you know, being in business 8. Wait until WE tell you to work hard! — Keep waiting… 9. Send in extra money after you’ve paid your taxes! Nah, just kidding… 10. Just, like, you know, whatever liberal politicians say from one day to the next…just do that, whatever it is…
"It's a helicopter, and it's coming this way. It's flying something behind it, I can't quite make it out, it's a large banner and it says, uh - Happy... Thaaaaanksss... giving! ... From ... W ... K ... R... P!! No parachutes yet. Can't be skydivers... I can't tell just yet what they are, but - Oh my God, Johnny, they're turkeys!! Johnny, can you get this? Oh, they're plunging to the earth right in front of our eyes! One just went through the windshield of a parked car! Oh, the humanity! The turkeys are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement! Not since the Hindenburg tragedy has there been anything like this!"
Oddly enough, this famous WKRP episode was loosely based on a real event! Back in 1946 (some sources say 1945), Yellville, Arkansas inaugurated the "Turkey Trot Festival" which included a wild turkey calling contest, a turkey target shoot, a Miss Drumsticks Pageant and oh yeah: a live turkey release from the roof of the courthouse.
After a few years, someone thought it might be fun to actually toss the poor gobblers out of a low-flying airplane for the event. This repeated for a number of years until 1989 when a national animal-rights protest cast the event in a bad light and the "National Enquirer" splashed a photo of the event across the nation forcing promoters to abandon the turkey drop. WKRP in Cincinnati's Turkey Drop Episode
Driving the Golden Spike, Promentory, Utah
In the late 1860s, photographer Andrew J. Russell traveled west to document the construction of the Union Pacific Railway in Wyoming and Utah, including the famous “golden spike” moment on May 10, 1869, when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads were joined in Promontory, Utah, creating the nation’s first transcontinental railroad. Russell captured images of the railway construction as well as the wide-open landscape of the American West and its inhabitants. - The Atlantic
Skullrock Rock, Wyoming. “The name of this rock is derived from the peculiar formation of the boulders lying at its base. It is situated three miles south of the railroad, in the mining district of Dale Creek Canyon.”
Never Yet Melted ｻ Let in Syrian Refugees?
Barack Obama says we are morally obliged to admit them. Before you decide, listen to this account from a German woman who speaks Arabic who traveled with a group of Syrian refugees on the train from Budapest to Vienna recently.
“Colourful, diverse, heterogeneous; you sure like to sell yourselves as proponents of diversity.
You tolerate every perversion and think that by doing so that you’re doing diversity a service. Yet you’re wrong once again. A picture doesn’t take on vivid contrasts when one mixes all the colours together, but when one paints each colour in its respective place. Large-scale diversity requires small-scale homogeneity.You can’t grasp this. You see one multicultural metropolis, and you want every city to become like it. You speak of diversity, but you want to make everything the same. Don’t you preach it to us every day? There has to be one market, you claim. One form of government is the right one. You want to implement one formulation of human rights, which should apply to everyone. We all live in one world. These are your slogans. How is it then that you dare to claim that you stand for diversity, when you hate diversity from the depths of your being?
Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun
There is nothing like having your finger on the trigger of a gun to reveal who you really are. Life or death in one twitch — ultimate decision, with the ultimate price for carelessness or bad choices.
It is a kind of acid test, an initiation, to know that there is lethal force in your hand and all the complexities and ambiguities of moral choice have fined down to a single action: fire or not?
In truth, we are called upon to make life-or-death choices more often than we generally realize. Every political choice ultimately reduces to a choice about when and how to use lethal force, because the threat of lethal force is what makes politics and law more than a game out of which anyone could opt at any time.
White House Gave ISIS 45 Minute Warning Before Bombing Oil Tankers
The Obama White House is giving ISIS a 45 minute warning before bombing their oil tankers by dropping leaflets advising potential jihadists to flee before air strikes in Syria. “Get out of your trucks now, and run away from them. Warning: air strikes are coming. Oil trucks will be destroyed. Get away from your oil trucks immediately. Do not risk your life,” the leaflet reads.“It’s not like these drivers are innocent, uninvolved ‘civilians’ like children or sick people,” writes J.E. Dyer. “They’re waging ISIS’s war, just like the other non-uniformed participants who make up 100% of ISIS’s ranks. This is how far the Obama administration is going to avoid “collateral damage” — and who knows, it may be worse.”
The Wolf - Cobb
It is motivated last night by Doc speaking as he unwrapped his injured hand. He said that the gun is a language he doesn't have to use 99.99% of the time. But he is fluent. I'm not even going to say that we all should be. The Grey Tribe knows who it is. When the saliva drips from the fangs and the breath is hot on their necks, the fluent will speak up. I'm a free man and I love to write and speak and communicate, it is my life force. The overwhelming majority of my life, English and French and Spanish and a half dozen computer languages have sufficed. But make no mistake, I'm literate and fluent in Gun. I'll sign up and speak Gun under oath if I am called. I don't think it's likely, and I don't watch The Walking Dead for fun. I simply practice.
FINALLY! MENSTRUATION-PROOF PANTIES FOR TRANSGENDER “MEN”
Thank heaven, therefore, that a company known as Thinx has thoughtfully released a line of “period-proof panties” that now come in a “boyshort” style so that these confused souls can still pretend they’re men during that time of the month when their vaginas are reminding them that they’re women:
The hiphugger, sport, cheeky, thong, and boyshort varieties each come with an absorbent, moisture-wicking, leak-resistant, and anti-microbial insert, which can replace sanitary products and still keep the wearer dry and fresh.
One hue of the rainbow you don’t see a lot.
But surely one of the sickest, saddest, and most revolting social phenomena of the past, I don’t know, ten thousand years is a small yet virulent sub-community of gay men who actively seek to become infected with HIV. While most people try to avoid acquiring viruses online, these fellas make it their mission. They are known as “bugchasers.”
How to Beat ISIS with a Hoax |
Ridiculous rumors travel faster than truth, and the more ridiculous, the better.In the fake video, actors pretend to be ISIS leaders bragging about how they take advantage of the young, stupid recruits. The conversation might include various leaders saying such things as…
- Hahahaha! We send idiots to slaughter so we can enjoy their sisters and mothers. Only winners get to spread their genes.
- We are collaborating with Israel and have been since the start. There is a secret pact for land-sharing once Assad is defeated.
- Behind closed doors the leaders mock the suicide bombers as being both gullible and defective in some mental or physical sense. The leaders might say they select suicide bombers on these criteria plus the attractiveness of any wives and sisters the bomber leaves behind
“Privilege” It certainly no longer means honor or pride:
The idea that a guy selling cars in Toledo has some intrinsic edge over Valerie Jarrett, Jorge Ramos, or Beyoncé because he is slightly pinker is ridiculous. Don’t take my word for it: when President Obama blasted the “clingers,” his subtext was that poor white uneducated and supposedly superstitious people did not and should not enjoy the privilege that he as an Ivy-League, arugula eating, and golf-putting elite enjoyed.
The Straight-Four Is the Purgatory of Car Engines
The inline-four is the purgatory of gasoline engines. To one side, a Hell of the economy-minded twins and triples that have typically powered the most humble of automobiles. On the other, a Heaven ofthroaty V8s or silken boxer sixes or ferocious V12s. The inline-fouris between those extremes. It is just enough. It is sufficient. It powers the Prius and the Chevette and the bulk of today's rental cars.
The sudden awareness that enemy is ruthless and armed, while the population is largely unarmed and vulnerablecan set one's gizzards to churning. It will prove impossible to oppose the Jihad without questioning the Western political orthodoxy.
This duality explains why resistance to Syrian refugee resettlement in America has taken the form of a 'revolt' against Barack Obama. "Governors across the country are publicly rejecting President Obama's plan to relocate Syrian refugees." There's a growing realization that the Jihadi threat in part rests upon a destructive political agenda in the West which enables it, nurtures it and spreads it because in some perverse way it helps those same Western political forces keep power.
Are Christianity and Science Incompatible? |
The idea of miracles -- far from undermining science -- implicitly assumes that there is a natural order to the universe, albeit one which from time to time is interrupted. Jesus' resurrection from the dead is more impressive because this one event, out of billions of biological phenomena, transgresses the laws of biology. A miracle would not be a miracle if there were no natural laws, or if the human mind could not be relied upon to understand them.
Give Hate a Chance
A Muslim just blew herself up during a raid. The Parisian people I met would blame the police for her death. “Let it be,” as the Beatles say.
I’m not kidding. At one of the memorials, I heard dozens of young people singing “Give Peace a Chance” together. They were also singing Top 40 ballads from the likes of John Legend. They smoked pot and took selfies and provided meaningless gifts to the dead like a Jim Morrison flag with the eyes painted black. Can we have just one hate crime, please? Can one skinhead throw a brick through one window? Can France take a break from pleading and singing and be irrational just for a day?
Belgian police earlier: "Hang on a minute, you said there were two dead here. So how come I've just found five feet?"
— Toby Harnden (@tobyharnden) November 21, 2015No-go & safe zones : On this planet, there are no permanent “safe zones,” for Catholics or others of the Christian persuasion. Or anyone.
The idea of retiring from the world, to the monastery or the hermitage, has, approximately, nothing to do with the “no-go” and safe zones demanded by Muslim psychopaths and campus liberals. Those a little acquainted with history will know there is no mountain so high, no desert so wide, to keep off the Devil. He is familiar with our earthly geography, and has that spirit of enterprise that progressive folk so honour. He’s comin’ ta get ya, and only those already got will fail to discern his approach.
Is Your Kid a Weirdo? :America is in the grip of a crisis, namely a shortage of normal people.
Evidence indicates that the population of kooks and freaks is rapidly increasing, and there are simply not enough sane people to keep the weirdos under control. Especially among the under-30 demographic, the United States is struggling to cope with the proliferation of dangerous perverts, drug addicts, psychotics and Ivy League liberal arts majors....
G.K. Chesterton: “My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”
Why Tom Wolfe is the most important writer of the twenty-first century.
I’ve stopped counting the number of times over the last year that I thought I was living in a Wolfe book. The hysteria and riots provoked by the police killing of Michael Brown, who never said, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” is a replay of Bonfire of the Vanities, published in 1987. The debate over migration, ethnicity, assimilation, and identity roiling the presidential primary was foreshadowed in 2012’s Back to Blood. The spectacle of a television star facing manslaughter charges who announces he’s become a woman—then being lauded for his courage while he says the hardest part of his new gender is “figuring out what to wear”—well, the absurdity of that one is rather without precedent. But no doubt Wolfe agrees that Caitlyn Jenner is great fun.
"During the summer, people, not the wildlife, turned this park into a zoo."
Yellowstone experienced an unprecedented surge in visitors in 2015, hitting four million people for the first time in its 143-year history. We talked with some rangers who relayed horror stories about the peak summer months: hour long lines just to get into the park, traffic jams for miles because of cars stopping to look at animals, and overflowing parking lots around major attractions. In July, one of their friends circled around the sizable parking lot of Old Faithful for an hour and a half before giving up completely.
During the summer, people, not the wildlife, turned this park into a zoo. But by October, the crowds had all but disappeared. But by late October, the crowds had all but disappeared. Every hotel was closed, there wasn’t a single tour bus to be seen, and only a handful of cars were on the road. Each parking lot we pulled into seemed comically oversized, but the rows and rows of empty spaces reminded us of what the park looks like when operating at full capacity. Despite the gloomy weather, we never stopped being grateful for arriving when we did. | Huckberry
"It must be incredibly frustrating as an Islamic terrorist not to have your views and motives taken seriously by the societies you terrorize, even after you have explicitly and repeatedly stated them.
"Even worse, those on the regressive left, in their endless capacity for masochism and self-loathing, have attempted to shift blame inwardly on themselves, denying the terrorists even the satisfaction of claiming responsibility.
"It's like a bad Monty Python sketch:
"We did this because our holy texts exhort us to to do it.""No you didn't."
"Wait, what? Yes we did..."
"No, this has nothing to do with religion. You guys are just using religion as a front for social and geopolitical reasons."
"WHAT!? Did you even read our official statement? We give explicit Quranic justification. This is jihad, a holy crusade against pagans, blasphemers, and disbelievers."
"No, this is definitely not a Muslim thing. You guys are not true Muslims, and you defame a great religion by saying so."
"Huh!? Who are you to tell us we're not true Muslims!? Islam is literally at the core of everything we do, and we have implemented the truest most literal and honest interpretation of its founding texts. It is our very reason for being."
"Nope. We created you. We installed a social and economic system that alienates and disenfranchises you, and that's why you did this. We're sorry."
"What? Why are you apologizing? We just slaughtered you mercilessly in the streets. We targeted unwitting civilians - disenfranchisement doesn't even enter into it!"
"Listen, it's our fault. We don't blame you for feeling unwelcome and lashing out."
"Seriously, stop taking credit for this! We worked really hard to pull this off, and we're not going to let you take it away from us."
"No, we nourished your extremism. We accept full blame."
"OMG, how many people do we have to kill around here to finally get our message across?"
Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham
Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm,
So ’gainst the winter’s balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.
'Cause uptown funk gon' give it to you
'Cause uptown funk gon' give it to you
'Cause uptown funk gon' give it to you
Saturday night and we in the spot
Don't believe me just watch (come on)
Don't believe me just watch uh
Don't believe me just watch
The presidential-gubernatorial split is an interesting development. Obama has responded with a brand new hashtag: #RefugeesWelcome. If you live in Hashtagistan, this is another great hashtag to add to such invincible hashtags as #PeaceForParis, #JeSuisCharlie, #UnitedForUkraine and, of course, #BringBackOurGirls.
If you live in the real world, the magic hashtags don't seem to work so well, and these governors seem to think #RefugeesWelcome will perform no better for New Mexico and New Hampshire than the others have worked out for Paris, Ukraine and Boko Haram-infested West Africa.
So reality is not yet entirely irrelevant - and reality is on the march:
An Italian priest is fighting for his life in northern Bangladesh after being shot and seriously wounded by unidentified gunmen.
The attack on Wednesday is the latest in a series targeting foreigners in the country, which have been blamed on Islamic militant groups including Islamic State.
A Jewish teacher has reportedly been stabbed in Marseille by three people claiming to be ISIS supporters... The suspects, who were reportedly wearing ISIS badges, made anti-semitic comments before stabbing the teacher.
A married couple plotted an Isil suicide bombing of the London Underground or Westfield shopping centre around the tenth anniversary of the 7/7 suicide attacks, a court heard on Tuesday.
Mohammed Rehman, 25, and his wife Sana Ahmed Khan, 24, had enough bomb material to "cause multiple fatalities"...
Tegucigalpa:
Honduras Detains Five Syrians Said Headed To U.S. With Stolen Greek Passports
Ottawa:
The man arrested Tuesday trying to enter Parliament carrying a hidden meat cleaver probably has mental illness and isn't a terrorist, the head of the RCMP said Wednesday.Toronto man Yasin Mohamed Ali, 56, was arrested outside the Centre Block of Parliament in Ottawa and appeared in court Wednesday.Hmm. "Mentally ill" "Toronto man"... But then, as John Kerry has assured us, all of the above is nothing to do with Islam.
Read it all: The Real Containment :: SteynOnline
From The Daily Beast: Russia Pounds ISIS With Biggest Bomber Raid in Decades
Putin’s air force just used its nuclear bombers to lay waste to the capital of the ‘Islamic State.’ But they also hit areas that have little to do with ISIS.
The Russian air force just pulled off one of the biggest and most complex heavy bomber missions in modern history—sending no fewer than 25 Backfire, Bear, and Blackjack bombers on a coordinated, long-range air raid against alleged ISIS forces in Syria.
The Tuesday mission, which launched under the cover of darkness from a base in Ossetia in southern Russia, signaled a significant escalation of Moscow’s air war in Syria—and heralded the rebirth of Russian heavy bomber squadrons that once had withered from a lack of funding.
Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of Russia’s general staff, announced the raid on Tuesday, calling it part of “a new plan [for] the air campaign.”
“During a massive airstrike today, 14 important ISIL targets were destroyed by 34 air-launched cruise missiles,” Gerasimov said, using an alternative acronym for the terror army. “The targets destroyed include command posts that were used to coordinate ISIL activities in the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, munition and supply depots in the northwestern part of Syria.”
The Russian Defense Ministry released a video depicting three types of Russian bombers arming, taking off, dropping munitions, and then returning to base, escorted along their flight paths by Su-27 fighters.
The swing-wing, jet-propelled Tu-22M Backfires apparently carried unguided “dumb” bombs. The video depicts airmen loading clusters of cruise missiles in the bomb bays of the propeller-driven Tu-95 Bears and the huge, swing-wing Tu-160 Blackjack jets, which at 177 feet long are the biggest combat planes ever built.
From War Is Boring: Russian Heavy Bombers Fly Huge Raid in Syria
On Nov. 17, Russia sent nearly 40 heavy bombers and escorting fighter jets on a massive air raid in Syria. Moscow has now showed off almost all of its aerial arsenal in strikes in the embattled Middle Eastern country.
Flying from bases in Russia, 25 Tu-160, Tu-95MS and Tu-22M3 bombers launched more than 30 cruise missiles and dropped dumb bombs on targets in Idlib and Aleppo provinces. A dozen Su-34 and Su-27SM fighter jets escorted the bombers on their mission.
The operation is the first ever combat mission for the massive Tu-160 Blackjack bomber. Similar in their basic configuration to the American B-1 “Bone,” the larger four-engine swing-wing bombers can fly twice as fast as the speed of sound and carry some 40 tons of bombs and missiles in two internal bomb bays.
The smaller, twin-engine Tu-22M3 Backfires can lug more than 50,000 pounds of weapons – similar to the B-1. The huge turboprop Tu-95MS Bears have the smallest maximum load – more than 30,000 pounds – of Moscow’s bomber fleet.
Already flying missions over Syria, the Su-34 Fullbacks are among Russia’s most advanced fighter jets, combining a highly maneuverable design with powerful radars and other gear. The Su-27SMs are the latest members of Moscow’s Flanker fleet and the most recent upgrades incorporate technology used on the Su-35 Super Flanker.
[Original video --Russia: Intensified air campaign kills "about 600" militants - General Kartapolov - YouTube -- taken down]
Published on Nov 18, 2015
Colonel General Andrei Kartapolov of Russia's armed forces announced from Moscow, Wednesday, that "one of the militant groups lost about 600 people," on the first day of Russia's redoubled air strike campaign against militant groups in Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier gave the greenlight to intensify airstrikes following news that Russia's Metrojet airliner was downed in Egypt by a bomb attack.
SOT, Andrei Kartapolov, Colonel-General, General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces (Russian): "Yesterday, in accordance with the Air Operation plan, the first massive aviation attack was carried out against 206 terrorist targets. In total 127 sorties were made."
SOT, Andrei Kartapolov, Colonel-General, General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces (Russian): "According to the information that we have, on November 17 one of the militant groups lost about 600 people."
､C/U Bombs being dropped footage *NO SOUND AT SOURCE*
､SOT, Andrei Kartapolov, Colonel-General, General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces (Russian): "In recent years, ISIS and other extremist groups have established a so-called "pipeline on wheels" in controlled territory. Hundreds of trucks transfer thousands of tons of crude oil to Iraq. This is one of the main sources of terrorist funding."
"We had a million pets when I was a child. Cats, rats, dogs, salamanders… and if we got one we wanted it to have a friend.
One cat turned into five, rats came in pairs, a turtle lived in our bathtub because someone broke the tank while cleaning it. I used the rats in a drunk driving PSA I made in a high school film class. We had a Doberman that ate $500 worth of Girl Scout cookies. I was mad because I was eight and wanted to eat $500 of Girl Scout cookies myself. I still do. So it makes sense that I wanted a dog of my own when I went off to college. A big rescue dog that I would train to do impressive things and name after a First Lady. I loved a boxer I saw at the shelter. It was the color of red clay with muscles like a real boxer. I looked at collies and rottweilers online. However, as most love stories go, it didn’t turn out as planned. I ended up with a three-pound pomeranian puppy from a pet store. He was on sale because he was too tall and had scraggly fur. I named him Tito Jackson. That was twelve years ago. -- Read it all at Narratively | Human stories, boldly told.
When Miles compiled this list, the words "crazy" and "ghetto" were still on the market. He has since learned from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that the former trivializes mental illness and the latter makes black people feel bad about their neighborhoods.
The rules may be confusing to you, which is why you need to be constantly checking in with Miles and his crew (gang? posse? organization?) to learn how to speak. Once we master that we can focus on what really matters: how to think.
Watch it if you can bear it.
What if Medina, the burial place of Muhammad was wiped off the face of the planet? What if the Dome Mosque on the Temple site in Jerusalem was blown up? The greatest weakness of Islam is that it is hopelessly tied to sacred cities and buildings. If these cities and buildings were destroyed, Islam would die within a generation as it would be apparent to all that its god could not protect the three holiest sites in Islam. The Achilles Heel of Islam | 5 Pt. SaltWhile all is being said, not much is being done.
To address a scourge such as Islam we must think in terms of extermination. Think: Dresden; Think: Hiroshima and Nagasaki;
Collateral damage? Every time some unfortunate guy gets beheaded and the video goes viral? Really, collateral damage? You're worried some kids or old people are gonna get killed? When they kill one of ours, we kill one hundred of theirs.
It has been seen and experienced in most every other country in the world, from the "super-powers" to the Third World yocky-dock countries: Islam is not a good thing. It benefits nobody, apparently not even the adherents.
We are all listening to rumors that something bad is gonna happen. Instead of cowering and hoping that it won't happen near us we should be fire-bombing Baghdad and other concentrations of Muslim terrorists. Can't find 'em? Enlarge the target area.
The justification, if one is needed, is that the Muslims are Evil. Whether we are spiritual or worldly, believers or atheists, young, old, gay or straight, male or female, White or Black, or any other combination of the above, the paradigm in which we all repose dictates that some things are good, some bad, and some Evil.
The remedy to the damage and destruction, the murder most foul and the barbaric actions of Muslims can only be met with a force strong enough to overcome once and for all that which threatens all others. Death sudden, overwhelming, final, no hesitation, and thorough by whatever means will accomplish the end result — elimination of the Evil. Wait until they break out the nukes.Posted by: chasmatic @ The "Droneiacs" Way of War
Here, at night in the heart of the caliphate, the only sound was the laughing of the ISIS fighters lounging about in the safety of their capital. The screams that had pierced the air when the jihadis had captured the Syrian city of Raqqa on the northern bank of the Euphrates were gone; those infidels who had not been butchered had fled.
But there was a rumble in the sky, but not like from one of the few American jets that would occasionally drop a bomb and then depart. No, this was deeper and more distant. The jihadis stopped talking to listen, puzzled. Then they and their world were torn apart.
The first wave of 12 B-52H’s emptied their bays of 750-pound dumb bombs directly over the heart of Raqqa, followed by a second wave, then a third. Crack Air Force ground crews were waiting back at the base in Saudi Arabia, and rearmament took less than two hours. Then they headed north again. In 24 hours, Raqqa ceased to exist.
One Month Earlier
“And those are our proposed courses of action, Mr. President,” concluded the CENTCOM commander.
“When I was elected, I told you I wanted to be briefed on your plan to utterly destroy ISIS, General,” the President said. He was young and usually quite calm, but as a Cuban-American son of immigrants, he understood tyranny and knew how to deal with it. “General, what you gave me are timid half-measures that don’t begin to meet the intent I expressed to you. Now, I may not have served myself, but I understand the old game of manipulating civilian leadership by providing just the options you want instead of the ones the commander-in-chief requested. You’re relieved of command, General. Fired. Agents, show the general out.”
He turned to his chief of staff. “Get the Wildman on the line.” As the Secret Service agents bum rushed the stunned four star out of the Oval Office, the President took the phone.
On a Florida golf course, the secure cell phone of the retired Marine everyone called “The Wildman” rang, ruining his putt. The Wildman was a legend for his aggression, hence his nickname. President Obama had naturally felt it necessary to replace him with a more pliable, passive CENTCOM commander. He answered, then listened.
“General, this is the President. We need you. I am ordering you off the retired list and back to active duty as CENTCOM commander, effective immediately. I want to see your plan for the total destruction of ISIS in 72 hours. Your rules of engagement are simple. Wipe them out.”
"We are here. Aqaba is there. It is only a matter of going."
"They think you are a backwoods hick that doesn't know what's good for yourself.
"They believe they are far more intelligent than you and you should do as they demand unquestioningly.
"If you don't do as they demand the force on high should be brought down on you, even death.
"To them it is not acceptable for you to run your life as you see fit.
"They don't care about you, but only what you can do for them.
"To them, you are their slave, to use as they see fit, then dispose of you anyway they want.
You have no say in any of this.
"If you try to reason with them you have poured gasoline on their inner fires and they will explode every manner of nastiness on you, including physical harassment and punishment.
"If you ask them to explain their reasoning, they cannot, so they will again explode on you.
"What can be done with dangerous human entities that want to harm you and cannot be reasoned with?
"They are walking around among us right now, maybe even living in our homes, with continuous thoughts of doing harm to as many people as possible.
"Why is this *allowed*?
"In my opinion dangerous people should be caged for a period of 1 year and then evaluated to determine if they are mentally competent to blend back into society.
"If, after 1 year, it has been determined that they cannot be fused back into society all of their property should be confiscated and they should be required to leave the United States and never return and their citizenship status permanently revoked, or, exterminated as being a danger to society and individuals everywhere.
"Society and individuals should not bear the responsibility of enduring the endless threats of harm from these people and the costs of maintaining them."
by ghostsniper at The Top 40: Comment on Magic Dirt Theory. The cause of and cure for all that ails the Progressive mind.
No time for a gentle rain
No time for my watch and chain
No time for revolving doors
No time for the killing floor
No time for the killing floor
There's no time left for you
No time left for you
For all the rhetorical fire directed against ISIS, from the denunciation of its massacres, outrages and cruelty, it has not been heavily hit. Its capital Raqqa, while seedy, still proceeds much as normal, unmarked by the damage and ruin which has overtaken so much of Syria, as this Wall Street Journal video shows. The bridge over the Euphrates which until lately supplied much of the city was knocked out only on November 5, 2015 — and by the Russian aircraft to boot — a testament to how careful Obama’s campaign has been. -- Belmont Club
From War in the Absence of Strategic Clarity by Mark Helprin, 2003
"The enemy must and can be defined. That he is the terrorist himself almost everyone agrees, but in the same way that the United States extended blame beyond the pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor, it must now reach far back into the structures of enablement for the sake of deciding who and what must be fought. And given the enormity of a war against civilians, and the attacks upon our warships, embassies, economy, capital, government, and most populous city, this determination must be liberal and free-flowing rather than cautious and constrained, both by necessity and by right. The enemy has embarked upon a particular form of warfare with the intent of shielding his center of mass from counterattack, but he must not be allowed such a baseless privilege. For as much as he is the terrorist who executes the strategy, he is the intelligence service in aid of it, the nation that harbors his training camps, the country that finances him, the press filled with adulation, the people who dance in the streets when there is a slaughter, and the regime that turns a blind eye.
"Not surprisingly, militant Islam arises from and makes its base in the Arab Middle East. The first objective of the war, therefore, must be to offer every state in the area this choice: eradicate all support for terrorism within your borders or forfeit existence as a state. That individual terrorists will subsequently flee to the periphery is certain, but the first step must be to deny them their heartland and their citadels.
"Recognizing that the enemy is militant Islam with its center the Arab Middle East, it is possible to devise a coherent strategy. The enemy's strengths should not be underestimated. He has a historical memory far superior to that of the West, which has forgotten its thousand-year war with Islamic civilization. Islamic civilization has not forgotten, however, having been for centuries mainly on the losing side. Its memory is clear, bitter, and a spur to action. And it dovetails with a spiritual sense of time far different from that of the West, where impatience arises in seconds, for the enemy believes that a thousand years, measured against the eternity he is taught to contemplate and accept, is nothing. Closely related to his empowering sense of time are his spiritual sense of mission, which must never be underestimated, and Islam's traditional embrace of martyrdom.
"This militant devotion, consciously or otherwise, pays homage to the explosive Arab conquests, which reached almost to Paris, to the gates of Vienna, the marchlands of China, India, and far into Africa. War based on the notion of Islamic destiny is underway at this moment in the Philippines, Indonesia, Sinkiang, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Palestine, Macedonia, Algeria, the Sudan, Sub-Saharan Africa, and throughout the world in the form of terrorism without limitation or humanitarian nuance -- all in service of a conception far more coherent than the somnolent Western nations seem to comprehend. The object long expressed by bin Laden and others is to flip positions in the thousand-year war. To do this, the Arabs must rekindle what the 10th-century historian Ibn Khaldun called 'asabiya, an ineffable combination of group solidarity, momentum, esprit de corps, and the elation of victory feeding upon victory. This, rather than any of its subsidiary political goals, is the objective of the enemy in the war in which we find ourselves at present. Despite many flickers all around the world, it is a fire far from coming alight, but as long as the West apprehends each flare as a separate case the enemy will be encouraged to drive them toward a point of ignition, and the war will never end.
"The proper strategic objective for the West, therefore, is the suppression of this fire of 'asabiya in the Arab heartland and citadels of militancy -- a task of division, temporary domination, and, above all, demoralization. As unattractive as it may seem, in view of the deadly alternative it is the only choice other than to capitulate....
"The war in Iraq was a war of sufficiency when what was needed was a war of surplus, for the proper objective should have been not merely to drive to Baghdad but to engage and impress the imagination of the Arab and Islamic worlds on the scale of the thousand-year war that is to them, if not to us, still ongoing. Had the United States delivered a coup de mainsoon after September 11 and, on an appropriate scale, had the president asked Congress on the 12th for a declaration of war and all he needed to wage war, and had this country risen to the occasion as it has done so often, the war on terrorism would now be largely over.
"But the country did not rise to the occasion, and our enemies know that we fought them on the cheap. They know that we did not, would not, and will not tolerate the disruption of our normal way of life. They know that they did not seize our full attention. They know that we have hardly stirred. And as long as they have these things to know, they will neither stand down nor shrink back, and, for us, the sorrows that will come will be greater than the sorrows that have been.
Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons,
Packed up and ready to go
Heard of some grave sites, out by the highway,
A place where nobody knows
Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?
Heard about Pittsburgh, P. A.?
You oughta know not to stand by the window
Somebody see you up there
I got some groceries, some peanut butter,
To last a couple of days
But I ain't got no speakers, ain't got no headphones,
Ain't got no records to play
Why stay in college? Why go to night school?
Gonna be different this time
Can't write a letter, can't send no postcard,
I ain't got time for that now
Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock,
We blended in with the crowd
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines,
I know that that ain't allowed
"for a state is not the growth of a day, any more than it grows out of a multitude brought together by accident. Hence the reception of strangers in colonies, either at the time of their foundation or afterwards, has generally produced revolution; for example, the Achaeans who joined the Troezenians in the foundation of Sybaris, becoming later the more numerous, expelled them; hence the curse fell upon Sybaris.
"At Thurii the Sybarites quarrelled with their fellow-colonists; thinking that the land belonged to them, they wanted too much of it and were driven out.
"At Byzantium the new colonists were detected in a conspiracy, and were expelled by force of arms; the people of Antissa, who had received the Chian exiles, fought with them, and drove them out; and the Zancleans, after having received the Samians, were driven by them out of their own city.
"The citizens of Apollonia on the Euxine, after the introduction of a fresh body of colonists, had a revolution; the Syracusans, after the expulsion of their tyrants, having admitted strangers and mercenaries to the rights of citizenship, quarrelled and came to blows; the people of Amphipolis, having received Chalcidian colonists, were nearly all expelled by them....
"For just as in war the impediment of a ditch, though ever so small, may break a regiment, so every cause of difference, however slight, makes a breach in a city."
The Moment Muslim Gunmen Started Shооting At The Bataclan Music Theatre In Paris Filmed From Inside
Stonehenge Begins to Yield Its Secrets
Ted Cruz Discusses the Paris Terrorist Attacks on Fox and Friends - YouTube
Bill Nye: Anti-Science Nutball And Budding Fascist
ASSHOLES, by Robert Gore Not you. Them.
China's Economy Is Worse Than You Think
My $120,000 Vacation - The New York Times For a small fortune, passengers can travel the globe aboard the Four Seasons’ spacious Boeing 757.
Gaza: Hitler 2 clothing store puts Palestinian knife-wielding mannequins on display
Yellowstone at the Edge of Winter
Truffles, Caviar, and Cristal: A Tale from the Mythic Days of Magazine
Aliens Cause Global Warming: A Caltech Lecture by Michael Crichton
What Libraries Can (Still) Do by James Gleick | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books Perhaps worst of all: the “bookless library” is now a thing. You can look it up in Wikipedia.
A Literate American: Home Brew / Fred Reed
The Original “Pink Ladies” Car, complete with Lipstick Holder and Pink Umbrella
Samuel Barber - "Dover Beach", Op. 3 Fischer-Dieskau, Juilliard Quartet
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
- - "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold
An Open Letter Regarding the Claremont Protest - Cobb
Where calling someone a 'racist' has nothing to do with what someone actually believes, but one's position in an artificial political war. This fight is not about crime and punishment, it's not even about the law. It's a tawdry catfight over bourgeois privileges between bourgeois actors which desperately seeks to inherit the imprimatur of Civil Rights struggle. My ass.
The Cultural Revolution Comes to America’s Campuses
Mob rule, not anything close to democracy, is at play. The so-called SJWs (Social Justice Warriors) seem to be functioning as early avatars of the infamous Red Guard, bullying and then threatening violence to anyone whose thoughts run outside what is deemed to be correct.
Educators love that word “discussion.”
It's second only to "dialogue." And a dialogue is not a one-sided set of demands accompanied by a hunger strike.
We Dissent | The Claremont Independent
Above all, we are disappointed that you and President Chodosh weren’t brave enough to come to the defense of a student who was told she was “derailing” because her opinions regarding racism didn’t align with those of the mob around her.
No matter how bad things are, they can always get worse.
Life in Russia under the Tsar was - no doubt - bad; but no matter how bad it was, Communism was worse. Those who thought (as so many apparently did, within Russia and abroad) 'things can only get better' if we rid ourselves of the Tsar... were pretty soon shown how very wrong they were.
No partisan community is based in reality.
If a group circles around sacred values, they’ll evolve into a tribal moral community. They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.
The Only Trigger Warning Colleges Need:
“Warning: Although this university values and encourages civil expression and respectful personal behavior, you may at any moment, and without further notice, encounter ideas, expressions and images that are mistaken, upsetting, dangerous, prejudiced, insulting or deeply offensive. We call this education.”
Progressives start to make sense once you realise they are herd animals.
This Yale professor had the misfortune of being the old or injured one who slipped out of the pack and fell prey to the jackals–sorry, I mean, stunning and brave social justice activists.
Why Tom Wolfe is the most important writer of the twenty-first century:
The professor who called for “muscle” to help her expel a reporter from a protest held a “courtesy post” in the department of journalism. The details of the saga—including, and I am not making this up, a “poop swastika”—read like a missing chapter of Wolfe’s 2004 novel I Am Charlotte Simmons.
Cancer doesn’t go away because you pretend it isn’t there.
No matter what we do, the intractable urban Bantustans will remain, vast, bleak, hermetically isolated from the dominant culture except through television. Newark, Trenton, Camden, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, and all the many others. These are forever.
Bart: [low voice] Hold it! Next man makes a move, the nigger gets it!Olson Johnson: Hold it, men. He's not bluffing.
Dr. Sam Johnson: Listen to him, men. He's just crazy enough to do it!
Bart: [low voice] Drop it! Or I swear I'll blow this nigger's head all over this town!
Bart: [high-pitched voice] Oh, lo'dy, lo'd, he's desp'it! Do what he sayyyy, do what he sayyyy!
[Townspeople drop their guns. Bart jams the gun into his neck and drags himself through the crowd towards the station]
Harriet Johnson: Isn't anybody going to help that poor man?
Dr. Sam Johnson: Hush, Harriet! That's a sure way to get him killed!
Bart: [high-pitched voice] Oooh! He'p me, he'p me! Somebody he'p me! He'p me! He'p me! He'p me!
Bart: [low voice] Shut up!
[Bart places his hand over his own mouth, then drags himself through the door into his office]
Bart: Ooh, baby, you are so talented!
[looks into the camera]
Bart: And they are so *dumb*!
"I was curious as to exactly how Barbie’s face has changed across the 56-year span she’s been around. Personally, I think the molds they used from 1987-1995 are the cutest, but I was still a little girl playing with Barbies at that time, so I may be a bit biased."
The ‘Yale snowflakes’: who made these monsters? | Brendan O’Neill These little tyrants are the bastard offspring of older radicals.
STREET CARNAGE THE INHERENT LAMENESS OF ISLAM - STREET CARNAGE There’s countless shit to point to when talking about how gay Islam is.
While Mom Is Out Clubbing, 8-Year-Old Kills Toddler | Truth Revolt Woman's attorney doesn't believe she is responsible.
Next In The Series: “Teen Daughter’s First Unplanned Pregnancy” | Goodbye, America (in a photo)
Dear Walmart, Someone Insulted Me In One of Your Stores. Your CEO Must Now Resign.
Do You Have Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome? - EBONY ".... actual memories are transmitted through the DNA."
Brilliant: "You don't ask questions. Questions are offensive." [HT: Anne Barnhardt]
My Sad Captains
by Thom Gunn
One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all
the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.
True, they are not at rest yet,
but now that they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.
Meanwhile, in Chico, Calif., another outdoor enthusiast, Gary Kirk, joined forces with another expert seamstress, Marcia Briggs.
They founded Caribou Mountaineering in 1974. At the time, Kirk was taking classes at Chico State on the GI Bill, and he couldn't find a pack that would hold all of his textbooks. "He took a pile of his chemistry textbooks, wrapped some nylon fabric around them, stapled it together and said, 'Will you make a backpack for my books?' " Briggs recalls. It took her a few days. The new pack was called the Cricket. From 'Book Strap' To 'Burrito': A History Of The School Backpack : NPR Ed : NPR
Academia’s Saul Bellow Moment | The American Conservative One day, hopefully soon, we’re going to reach a point where those of us who dissent from the antiliberalism of the campus Left will simply announce, with e.e. cummings, that “There is some sh*t I will not eat.”
The Drake Equation: The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses.
And guesses-just so we’re clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL[where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet’s life during which the communicating civilizations live.] Aliens Cause Global Warming: A Caltech Lecture by Michael Crichton
Since equality in ignorance is easier to achieve than equality in learning,
each and every teacher will have to equalize his class at the bottom level rather than at the top one, and the whole school system will spontaneously obey the same law. It is anti-democratic to teach all children what only some of them are able to learn. Nay, it is anti-democratic to teach what all children can learn by means of methods which only a minority of pupils are able to follow. Since, as has been said, democracy stands for equality, democratic societies have a duty to teach only what is accessible to all and to see to it that it be made accessible to all. The overwhelming weight of their school population is therefore bound to lower the centre of gravity in their school systems. The first peril for democracies, therefore, is to consider it their duty, in order to educate all citizens, to teach each of them less and less and in a less and less intelligent way.” - - Democracy versus God : Essays in Idleness
'Dead Hand' Re-Examines The Cold War Arms Race :
They found that the uranium had been abandoned by the Soviets after the collapse. It had been put there because they were building a new submarine and when the Soviet Union collapsed, the submarine project was abandoned. All this uranium, 90 percent enriched, laying in big canisters that look like hotel coffee pots, on sheets of plywood, in a Kazakh warehouse. So the United States paid millions of dollars to the Kazakhs and conducted a secret operation. It was not announced ahead of time. A group of 35 Americans flew there in secret, in big transport planes, packed up that uranium over a month, and then on a cold snowy day put it into those C5 transport planes and flew it all the way back to the United States. And the reason they did this is that the Iranians were looking all over Central Asia for this kind of uranium.
Geena Davis, the Early Years (1979) pre-Tootsie.
From The Closing of the American Mind, the famous 1987 book by Bellow’s friend Allan Bloom “
You don’t have to intimidate us,” said the famous professor of philosophy in April 1969, to ten thousand triumphant students supporting a group of black students who had just persuaded “us,” the faculty of Cornell University, to do their will by threatening the use of firearms as well as threatening the lives of individual professors. A member of the ample press corps newly specialized in reporting the hottest item of the day, the university, muttered, “You said it, brother.” The reporter had learned a proper contempt for the moral and intellectual qualities of professors. Servility, vanity and lack of conviction are not difficult to discern.
"I don’t care if Dr. Carson thinks
the pyramids of Egypt stored the grain of Joseph. I am deeply ashamed for our nation that our press put this matter before public attention, and that the public, including me, is wasting our time with it.
"As a science fiction writer, if I had to invent a more trivial matter to distract the public in a period of history (during which the middle east is burning, the Pax Americana has come to an end, the US Constitution is dying, perhaps dead, Europe is overrun by rape-happy hoards of young Muslim enemies, Israel is less than a decade away from being annihilated by a US-funded nuclear Iran, and the debt-addled West is in the first stages of total economic collapse) as imaginative as I may be, I surely could not think of a more useless and insignificant matter to place on the public stage.
"Come now: the world is on fire, the flames are at the door of the powder magazine, and the newsvermin wish to quiz a candidate for the leadership of the free world about archaeology and Egyptology." -- Ben Carson Just Won my Support | John C. Wright's JournalContinued...
All we have of freedom, all we use or know—
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.
Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw—
Leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the Law.
Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey-goose wing
Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, slowly from the King.
Till our fathers 'stablished, after bloody years,
How our King is one with us, first among his peers.
So they bought us freedom—not at little cost
Wherefore must we watch the King, lest our gain be lost,
Over all things certain, this is sure indeed,
Suffer not the old King: for we know the breed.
Give no ear to bondsmen bidding us endure.
Whining “He is weak and far”; crying “Time shall cure.”,
(Time himself is witness, till the battle joins,
Deeper strikes the rottenness in the people's loins.)
Give no heed to bondsmen masking war with peace.
Suffer not the old King here or overseas.
They that beg us barter—wait his yielding mood—
Pledge the years we hold in trust—pawn our brother's blood—
Howso' great their clamour, whatsoe'er their claim,
Suffer not the old King under any name!
Here is naught unproven—here is naught to learn.
It is written what shall fall if the King return.
He shall mark our goings, question whence we came,
Set his guards about us, as in Freedom's name.
He shall take a tribute, toll of all our ware;
He shall change our gold for arms—arms we may not bear.
He shall break his judges if they cross his word;
He shall rule above the Law calling on the Lord.
He shall peep and mutter; and the night shall bring
Watchers 'neath our window, lest we mock the King—
Hate and all division; hosts of hurrying spies;
Money poured in secret, carrion breeding flies.
Strangers of his counsel, hirelings of his pay,
These shall deal our Justice: sell—deny—delay.
We shall drink dishonour, we shall eat abuse
For the Land we look to—for the Tongue we use.
We shall take our station, dirt beneath his feet,
While his hired captains jeer us in the street.
Cruel in the shadow, crafty in the sun,
Far beyond his borders shall his teachings run.
Sloven, sullen, savage, secret, uncontrolled,
Laying on a new land evil of the old—
Long-forgotten bondage, dwarfing heart and brain—
All our fathers died to loose he shall bind again.
Here is naught at venture, random nor untrue—
Swings the wheel full-circle, brims the cup anew.
Here is naught unproven, here is nothing hid:
Step for step and word for word—so the old Kings did!
Step by step, and word by word: who is ruled may read.
Suffer not the old Kings: for we know the breed—
All the right they promise—all the wrong they bring.
Stewards of the Judgment, suffer not this King!
The Old Issue by Rudyard Kipling
This is pretty much all we need to remember. Why is it so easy to forget?
HT: True North
"Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free." -- Richard Cotten
SDR Traveller 1M Hauly The 1M Hauly is designed for the discreet, comfortable carry of up to US$1 Million in used bank notes.
In many countries project expenses and payroll for the local crew need to be carried in cash. Whether you’re managing a team of thirty working for months at the edge of the grid, or on a solo trip to negotiate a significant cash transaction, the 1M Hauly is designed for discreet, safe carry of up to $1 Million USD in strapped, new or used $100 USD banknotesDesigned to address the six main issues with carrying significant volume banknotes in field: risk of discovery; risk of damage (especially in high-humidity, monsoon environments); container robustness; carryability; glide; and in-field accounting.
A human heart awaits transplant in Bodenhausen, Germany. New advances in understanding high cholesterol may help people with coronary heart disease.
And the Oscar of Science Goes To … About ten years ago, cardiologist Helen Hobbs and her team made a discovery that "shocked even us."
The scientists had been investigating a liver protein, dubbed PCSK9, that's responsible for circulating harmful LDL cholesterol in the human body. Their experiments revealed that some African Americans who naturally lacked PCSK9 had an incredible 88 percent reduction in their risk of developing coronary heart disease. "That really got us thinking," says Hobbs, a professor at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. If PCSK9 could be inhibited in people at risk of the disease, science could develop a drug even more powerful than statins, the current gold standard for treating high cholesterol. The condition often leads to heart disease, which affects more than 13 million people and is America's number one killer. (Read "Healing the Heart" in National Geographic magazine.) This year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a PCSK9 inhibitor, with more medicines likely to come. "They’re gonna be huge," Hobbs predicts.
Otis Redding (1941-67). He was born in Georgia and started his career with Little Richard.
He released six albums from 1964, and another 14 were released posthumously. But it was not until five compilation albums were released from 1967 that he was recognised as the greatest soul singer in pop history. Singers with soul
Oh, and by the way, West Point apparently uses the words "full scholarship" in describing its tuition policies in its marketing materials:
It is inconceivable that in 1960 a black high school graduate with the academic credentials enabling him to get into Yale, and also graduating from high school ROTC at the top of his class would not have been courted by many including Army generals to apply for West Point,
or that he would not have received an appointment had he applied. The benefits would be free tuition and room and board: sort of a full expenses scholarship and it’s not unlikely that one or another of those trying to recruit him would have used the phrase “like a scholarship.” Dr. Carson chose to go to pre-med and medical school and the rest of the training to become a neuro surgeon rather than to join the Army; but it is not a surprise that he is proud of having been asked to go to West Point. It is also not a surprise that certain people calling themselves journalists use this pride to malign him because he may have said he was offered a scholarship. Chaos Manor – Jerry Pournelle
How can these priests, bishops and Bergoglio be doing these things?
How can they peddle sacrilege and heresy like this – day in, day out, week in, week out?BECAUSE THEY DON’T ACTUALLY BELIEVE ANY OF THAT “BULLSHIT”. And by “bullshit”, they mean “Christianity”.
They don’t give a crap about the Eucharist because they DON’T BELIEVE IN THE EUCHARIST.
They don’t give a crap about God and His Holy Church or the Sacraments therein, or the Divine Law thereof because THEY DON’T BELIEVE IN ANY OF IT.Just a Reminder | Barnhardt
Democracy is the assumption of guilt
For that reason, before the question is even asked in a democracy, the answer is known: give more rights and benefits to anyone who does not have them; let the guilty go free; always destroy anything more powerful, more beautiful and more intelligent than we the herd. - - Amerika
Top Ten Adviceses for Aspirating Writerers
Make sure all the guidance you seek out on any topic is from a deciled list. Never read anything with even a hint of paragraphs about it. Numbered pages are right out. Don't waste your time with any wild-eyed iconoclasts while you're poking around the Intertunnel looking for your lists. Remember that nothing important ever consists of nine or eleven items. Ten items is your guarantee of quality.
We are Winning the War Against SJWs
Perform a thought experiment. If we wanted to take America back from the SJWs, how long would the fight last? 12 hours? 24 hours? The military is on our side. Good ole boys from the Ranger Regiment in Ft. Benning, Georgia aren’t going to kill red necks like me on orders from blue-haired social justice warriors.
"Why did you come to Seattle?"
"I came to Seattle for the love."
"The love? But Seattle is a desert."
"I was misinformed."
Back at the beginning of this century, absent being in a coma, being a terrorist or monk somewhere on a high mountain, or being sunk to your neck in the middle of a cypress swamp, you could not escape the story of "The Runaway Bride:"
"The runaway bride case was the case of Jennifer Carol Wilbanks (born March 1, 1973), an American woman who ran away from home on April 26, 2005, in order to avoid her wedding with John Mason, her fiancé, on April 30. Her disappearance from Duluth, Georgia, sparked a nationwide search and intensive media coverage, including some media speculation that Mason had killed her. On April 29, Wilbanks called Mason from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and falsely claimed that she had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a Hispanic male and a white woman. Jennifer Wilbanks gained notoriety in the United States and internationally, and her story persisted as a major topic of national news coverage for some time after she was found and her safety was assured. "
Wilbanks was the plat du jour of selfishness and fear in our blighted age and was the story of the decade for as long as her story lasted. When she finally showed up and confessed she was parsed and probed, drawn, quartered, and generally eviscerated by the rapacious media until she was little more than a damp spot on some discarded surgical sponge.
I despised The Runaway Bride from the first moment it was revealed she had simply freaked out and taken the geographic cure by getting gone to Las Vegas. It was a match made in hell. Along with Wilbanks sane people have to hate Las Vegas too -- a place that advertises that when you do freak out, it is the psycho's vacation destination of choice. Being a psycho’s institutional refuge is pathetic reason for a town to exist, but cheap and low places need to work with what they have. After all, nobody would mistake Vegas for Vatican City until, of course, they build a 1/3rd scale model of Saint Peters and slam six thousand slots into the basilica -- something I am sure is in the planning stage.
Still Vegas was the perfect place for The Runaway Bride to select as the terminus of her bus ticket. Once you go psycho in America it seems you have to pass through at least a Las Vegas of the mind and soul even if your final destination is someplace much more mundane like.... Albuquerque.
Let her go.Let her go. God bless her,
Wherever she may be.
She can search, search this whole world wide over....
-- St. James Infirmary
In sum, Wilbanks freaked out, flipped out, bugged out, came back, fessed up, and was forgotten in a wave of law suits.... "then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago."
That’s the story. That's the surface. Let's take a dive.
Let's look instead at what lies far below the personalities of this pathetic drama and into the deeper principles which illuminate why this tawdry little tale had such a large impact.
Father forgive the media, they know not what they do. But sometimes they do things right in spite of themselves. "The Runaway Bride" was one of those stories. And no matter how many in the media beat up their peers for paying too much attention to this tawdry tale, in the end it reveals a deeper truth about ourselves and our lives.
What we are really seeing here is something that has a deep and abiding interest to humans because it is something that happens -- in their secret hearts and deeper souls -- to millions of human beings every single day. This particular iteration is a modern passion play in which people act out on the stage of the nation our daily common tragedy entitled:
Love Gone Missing.
It seems to me that if we knew the secrets of all our hearts, we'd know that love goes missing in our country thousands of times an hour. True it doesn't usually go for a run, take a taxi, and grab a bus for destinations thousands of miles away, but that can often be the end of it.
Love goes missing in a moment of fear, of spite, of words spoken or left unspoken, in the blink or wink of an eye or in a spoken sentence only half-heard or remembered wrongly.
Love untempered by fire or by ice is a skittish thing in our lives. We think we know what love is, but we really only know what we've been told love is -- at least at the beginning.
We've been told Love is the white-hot passion that comes at the beginning of romance and is supposed to sustain itself at that level of heat across the decades. When that expectation burns through the weak vessels that we are, love goes missing -- off on a quest to find the next pile of fuel on which to burn. Go to a Family Courthouse in any county in this country on any day of the week and you'll see, scattered about the corridors and waiting their turn before the judges, the scorched waste, sodden ash, and family rubble left by this fools' fire.
We've been told that Love is seen in the increasingly lavish weddings whose example is the 14 bridesmaids, 600 guests bash that our current poster child for Love Gone Missing fled from. With such a monstrous beginning, what love could not go missing either before or soon after. No real love can measure up to such grandiose beginnings. After all, Princess Diana had only 5 bridesmaids at her wedding and we all know about the bloody tunnel in which that love gone missing ended in a Paris night.
Wise people and scriptures all tell us that Love, if it is not to go missing, should be built carefully and slowly until what lies inside Love is seen and grasped. But our contemporary Love we are told should not be centered on the soul but on things. We are told that Love needs to be seen in the world through things -- the place setting from Tiffany's, the endless objects from the multiple registries, the proof positive of the house becoming the ever larger house as we flip our homes every three years to get our nice appreciation rise. And so we seek to buttress and shore up Love by meeting the expectations of others in the material realm. God forbid you fail those expectations, for then, in an instant of selfish decision -- that always opts for better and not for worse -- Love Goes Missing.
In my life I’ve seen love go missing in a single, secret, brief and enraged glance on Christmas Day. I've heard love go missing months before the front door slammed. I've seen it go missing in me in a hundred silent moments where I did not speak my heart and in a hundred other moments when I spoke my heart falsely and far too quick. And the only thing I think I've learned about love gone missing is to let it go -- and I'm not even sure about that no matter how often it is repeated to me.
For most of us, when Love Goes Missing it is not easily found again. When it goes missing it goes -- near or far in space -- a long, long way away and we don't have the town turn out to walk search grids for our family, or issue nationwide alerts, or offer $100,000 rewards. Love just goes and once it goes we may struggle to find it for a time, but by that time it is far out of reach and beyond our puny power to locate.
But even if one could locate it, what good would that do?
Love gone missing can't be compelled to return like some runaway bride taken through the airports with a cloak over its head -- an apprehended perpetrator of the non-crime of going missing. Love's a wild force in our too domesticated and ordered lives. Once gone missing,for whatever reason, Love can't be just taken back as it was even if it is found. For if love gone missing is found and returns, it always remains a shattered vessel.
Yes, I know that in the endless bromides of our modern Therapeutic State Religion one is supposed to find the heart, the mercy, the compassion, and the patience to pick up every little shard of what has been shattered and, with our ample supplies of theraputic superglue, painfully and tediously put it all back together as it was.
Except, of course, Love can never be what it was before it went missing.
Love gone missing takes with it the hostages of trust and truth but they don't come back with it if it returns. They've been buried somewhere en route and their locations long forgotten, far off the map. Even if you could accept it without them, you'd still see the fine hairline cracks in the vase you put back together together. You'd both handle the love like a rare museum object, always looking for the next soft place to store it so that it could not break or escape again. Love under constant guard will never be entirely free from the craving to go missing once again. At any time and for any reason. Sometimes for no reason at all.
So, like so many other things that ring deep in the changes of our hearts, we look for what to do; for how we can fix what cannot be fixed by us. If we find love gone missing and if it seems to have been returned to us we look to repair the rare and delicate thing. But it is, we find, like trying to repair a Swiss Watch with sledgehammer. Nobody human has that delicate a touch.
Perhaps it is better, in the end, to learn to let Love be. Nobody says you can have only one love with one person. If there can be, and there is, room for more than one love in one life, perhaps there can be more than one love in one love. Maybe the answer, if answer there be, is not the easy answer of repair, but the harder answer of starting all over from the gross and shapeless clay of love.
Maybe you worked too fast at the first pass of love and threw on the wheel of your days a lopsided and thin pot, something that had, deep inside it, some emptiness, some pockets of thin air that you could not see from outside, but that caused it to crack inside under the long heat of our lives of days and hands.
Not everything that's pretty is strong.
Perhaps the best thing to do with love gone missing is, as said before, to just let it go and get it gone. It seems cold to say that no search will find Love again as it was at its inception, but that's probably the truth. At the same time, and in the always inscrutable nature of love, to know that love has gone missing is not the same as knowing that love itself is gone. That's the thing that we always seem to miss; the thing we most need to remember.
Maybe, if you take the time to improve your skills on the wheel of life, you will be able at some point to take up the clay of that love and, kneading more patiently, centering more carefully, and shaping with caring and constant hands a better, stronger vessel.
True, it might not be as fine and pretty as the first more delicate one, but it could be good and serviceable and steady. Not at all as likely to shatter on a glance or a word or a silence or a shadow and just go missing.
Like all things made here on the great wheel, such a remade love could -- in time -- be coming around again.
Here's the drainpipe--a long tunnel going up toward some light. The spider doesn't even think about it--just goes. Disaster befalls it--rain, flood, powerful foces. And the spider is knocked down and out beyond where it started. Does the spider say, "To hell with that"? No. Sun comes out--clears things up--dries off the spider. And the small creature goes over to the drainpipe and looks up and thinks it really wants to know what is up there.” ― Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Holy shit: Ben Carson lied right in his literary bio. pic.twitter.com/Zx6PAIvwrF
— Anthony Bialy (@AnthonyBialy) November 6, 2015
Project Aura: Bicycle Safety Lighting System Riding at night can be a daunting and dangerous task; many biking commuters are faced with the issue of being obscured when riding on the streets.
Visibility at night is a vital component of biker safety, hence the need for reflectors and attachable lights. However, some of these devices are not always effective especially from the side. We created a system that requires very little rider input and maintenance, while increasing the visual footprint of bikers from all directions especially from the side. We accomplished this by expanding the surface area of light emitted through the use of RGB LEDs inside the rims of the wheels that change from red when slowing down to white when at cruising speed. It should be noted that Project Aura is a lighting system which allows a rider to be seen, but does not replace a forward facing headlight to illuminate the roadway.
[HT: Sake White]
The score so far: 2015 Stats | Chicago Murder, Crime & Mayhem | HeyJackass!
Chicago, Chicago that slaughterin’ town
Chicago, Chicago'll put ya in the ground
Bet your bottom dollar you lose your life in Chicago, Chicago
The town that Rahm Obama couldn't cool down
On State Street, that hate street, I just want to say
They shoot kids as they go out to play
They have the time, the time of their short life
I saw a man, shot dead with his wife,
In Chicago, O-bama’s home town
Chicago, Chicago that slaughterin’ town
Chicago, Chicago'll put ya in the ground
Bet your bottom dollar you lose your life in Chicago, Chicago
The town that Rahm Obama couldn't cool down
On State Street, that hate street, I just want to say
They shoot kids as they go out to play
They have the time, the time of their short life
I saw a man, shot dead with his wife,
In Chicago, O-bama’s home town!
"Come on out of that vehicle!" 9/18/2015 Chicago police response 87th and Morgan
Six Minutes with DJ Akademiks: What could possibly be the cause of the killings? Media confused. Not the people living in Chicago."You got to remember that most of the people who are dying are not gang-members but kids...."
Blood being washed down a storm drain in the Loop, 2014
Ad man relishes success in anti-HERO campaign | "Voters don't respond to bland, wishy-washy messages," said Norwood, who served as county judge in Midland County before founding Anthem Media. "We were clear and concise. We didn't sugarcoat it."
From Cod to Codpieces: Benjamin Franklin’s Guide to Food and Sex |
I had formerly been a great Lover of Fish & when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smelled admirably well. I balanc’d some time between Principle & Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs: Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you. So I din’d upon Cod very heartily and continu’d to eat with other People, returning only now & then occasionally to a vegetable Diet.
Republicans have an absolute stranglehold on governorships and state legislatures all across the country. But why? The Democrats were evicted not because of any superiority in Republican organization but because their program eventually went stale and fell apart.
The Tyranny of a Big Idea - WSJ
Modern liberalism is best understood as a movement of would-be believers in search of true faith. For much of the 20th century it was faith in History, especially in its Marxist interpretation. Now it’s faith in the environment. Each is a comprehensive belief system, an instruction sheet on how to live, eat and reproduce, a story of how man fell and how he might be redeemed, a tale of impending crisis that’s also a moral crucible. In short, a religion without God.
Republicans have total or partial control of 76% of the country's state legislatures. Wow. https://t.co/djJHy5fclV pic.twitter.com/lmhjx6cyax
— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) November 4, 2015Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers |
Labbé developed a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers. SCIgen was invented in 2005 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers — and, as they put it, “to maximize amusement” (see ‘Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper’).
Keyhole Rock in Big Sur, California. "This phenomenon occurs a few days a year during the winter solstice and when weather conditions are perfect for the alignment to happen. With my pure luck I got to experience a truly magical sunset. It felt like volcanic eruption through natural light." -- Bachir Badaoui 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest, Part II - The Atlantic
Raconteur Report: Turns Out He Can't Do Stand Up Comedy Either
Not only do Germans have to put up with hostile illiterate Muslim “refugees” who crowd their public spaces and leave filth in their wake. Not only do they have to endure increased levels of assault, theft, rape, and other crimes. Not only are they forced to keep quiet about it all, to shut their mouths if they don’t want to be prosecuted and/or lose their jobs. Now it looks like they’ll be forced into the service of the migrants.
The 7 Keys To Trapping As Many Americans As Possible In Poverty:
Have the Federal Reserve print money non-stop, which drives up inflation. Over time, that reduces the purchasing power of the middle class as the cost of everything seems to creep up. It’s also important to go after cheap sources of energy like oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power. Not only does that drive up the cost the middle class pays across the board for products, it also hits people directly when they heat and cool their homes. Exploding medical costs are also helpful and Obamacare has done an amazing job of this. Medical costs are skyrocketing for the middle class and helping to drive them towards poverty.
South Park: This is the best season in a decade
This place is lost in a time warp. Students who still use the word retarded. A teacher who said women without wombs should get an AIDS test. A chef person of color who the children had sing soul songs, and who the children drove to kill himself. Lemme ask you this. We’re in Colorado, right? Where are the Hispanic kids? Huh? WHERE ARE THE ETHNIC AND RACIAL MINORITIES?
The fruit of equality: George Orwell’s 1984.... serves as a warning about political instability brought on by popular sentiment.
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
Rafael Cruz, a crusader for America:
“We have to stop acquiescing even to the wording that the liberals use. Just think about it. They talk about — in the issue of life, they say ‘pro-life,’ or ‘pro-choice.’ That’s not the right word. It is ‘pro-life’ or ‘pro-death.’ It is ‘pro-life’ or ‘pro-murder.’ And so, it’s just like calling homosexuals ‘gays.’ Gay means happy! You know, it’s just to try to dilute it so that it becomes socially acceptable, and if you say anything against homosexual marriage or anything — ‘Oh, you’re not tolerant.’ So we’re supposed to prostitute our principles, on behalf of tolerance. Well, I’ll tell you what: there are absolutes. There are absolutes. Start being biblically correct, instead of politically correct.”
The importance of college education cannot be overstated.
The strand of drool is especially charming.
Of course I got many details wrong:
I didn’t foresee that each nation would no longer merely import their own pet Muslims (Turks to Germany, Pakistanis to Britain, Algerians to France, etc.), but that it would turn into a pan-Islamic colonization of the whole continent en masse. Also, having started assigning humorous new names to the nations in central Europe, I ran out of ideas after a few minutes and just abandoned the theme halfway through, leaving most of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia with their original names. But interestingly, I did predict that it would be the Hungarians and the Swiss who, among all central European nations, would most actively resist the immigration — exactly as is playing out today. How could I have known that?
What was a joke in 2004 is a brutal reality in 2015, and even the progressive elites who encouraged this continental suicide now concede that the immigration crisis is only going to get worse, with no end in sight, as seemingly half the population of the Middle East is now in the process of relocating to a new homeland in Europe. - - · zomblog
It's not about the song. It's never been about the song. It has always been about the coda.
The opening five bars to the guitar part of "Layla"
Royal Albert Hall, 1988
"'Layla' is a difficult one, because it's a difficult song to perform live.
You have to have a good complement of musicians to get all of the ingredients going, but when you've got that. ... It's difficult to do as a quartet, for instance, because there are some parts you have to play and sing completely opposing lines, which is almost impossible to do. If you've got a big band, which I will have on the tour, then it will be easy to do something like 'Layla'—and I'm very proud of it. I love to hear it. It's almost like it's not me. It's like I'm listening to someone that I really like. Derek and The Dominos was a band I really liked—and it's almost like I wasn't in that band. It's just a band that I'm a fan of. Sometimes, my own music can be like that. When it's served its purpose to being good music, I don't associate myself with it any more. It's like someone else. It's easy to do those songs then." -- Eric Clapton
Clapton originally wrote "Layla" as a ballad, with lyrics describing his unrequited love for Pattie Boyd, but the song became a "rocker" when Allman reportedly composed the song's signature riff.
With the band assembled and Dowd producing, "Layla" was recorded in its original form. The recording of the first section consisted of sixteen tracks of which six guitar tracks: a rhythm track by Clapton, three tracks of harmonies played by Clapton (the main power chord riff on both channels and two harmonies against that main riff, one on the left channel and one on the right channel), a track of solos by Allman (fretted solos with bent notes during the verses and a slide solo during the outro), and one track with both Allman and Clapton playing duplicate solos (the 7-note "signature" riff doubled in two octaves and the 12-note "signature" riff doubled in unison). While recording this duplicate solos master track each player used one input of the same two-input Fender Champ amplifier. Shortly afterward, Clapton returned to the studio, where he heard Gordon playing a piano piece he had composed separately. Clapton, impressed by the piece, convinced Gordon to allow it to be used as part of the song. Though only Gordon has been officially credited with this part, Whitlock claimed, "Jim took that piano melody from his ex-girlfriend Rita Coolidge. -- La Wik
What'll you do when you get lonely
And nobody's waiting by your side?
You've been running and hiding much too long.
You know it's just your foolish pride.
Layla, you've got me on my knees.
Layla, I'm begging, darling please.
Layla, darling won't you ease my worried mind.
I tried to give you consolation
When your old man had let you down.
Like a fool, I fell in love with you,
Turned my whole world upside down.
Layla, you've got me on my knees.
Layla, I'm begging, darling please.
Layla, darling won't you ease my worried mind.
Let's make the best of the situation
Before I finally go insane.
Please don't say we'll never find a way
And tell me all my love's in vain.
Layla, you've got me on my knees.
Layla, I'm begging, darling please.
Layla, darling won't you ease my worried mind.
Layla, you've got me on my knees.
Layla, I'm begging, darling please.
Layla, darling won't you ease my worried mind.
Original studio recording and variations if you...
Continued...
We're all saying "Aw, no, can't happen, we're too smart for [to elect Hillary]." Blow wise to this: number of ballots wins race, not average IQ. -- Chasmatic
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
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